Ok I was happily trading the Russell 2000 for free with my broker as an active trader.
On Apr 1, they now charge 100$/month for IPE/ICE exchange (Russell 2k) whatever products. It is 1$/month to trade ES/NQ with my broker.
What the hell...
ICE needs to make back all the money they spent in buying those products like Emini TF futures from the CME.
The actual fee that ICE is charging for the Emini TF futures is $110. Thus, if you're broker is only passing to you $100 of that fee...the broker is giving you a $10 discount off the total.
The fees activated on April 1st. It will be interesting to see if liquidity, volume drops in products like Emini TF futures and the Brent Oil BRN futures. The result is that many retail traders will just stop trading these products and switch to other products like...Emini NQ futures, Emini ES futures, Emini YM futures, Emini EMD futures and so on.
Ironically, ICE purchased the Emini TF futures was purchased from the CME back in September 2008...a purchase that basically destroyed the volatility of the Russell Emini when it was known on the CME as Emin ER2 along with killing 1/2 the volume. Now with the new fees...traders will be driven to other products on the CME that could possibly force ICE to sell it back to the CME due to the lack of interest. In fact, I remember reading articles about the purchase in financial magazines that essentially predicted by business experts that this would occur...fee increases that will eventually drive away small traders to other trading products and then the reselling of the Russell Emini to another exchange.
This isn't a bad thing for the ICE and it may be intentional considering the bulk of ICE income is from professional institutional traders, hedge funds and other financial institutions that prefer to use the Russell Emini for spread trading and hedging. Thus, ICE may have lost interest in dealing with "small traders" and decided to make as much money as they can off the "small trader" along with ICE hoping they can sell the Russell Emini TF futures to someone else like the CME.
I remember the highest price prediction (fees per month) was $250 for the Emini TF before 2020. The trading business is slowly becoming something in which they only want to do business with "active traders" and with traders that can easily absorb these increasing exchange fees. That started when many brokers several years back adopted "inactivity fees".
